| Article about Dagerman... |
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Heir of the Holocaust by Paul Newman
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One of the mosttalented young Swedish writers of his generation, Stig Dagerman explored the divide between inner dissolution and outer stability, between social notation and private hallucination - an exploration that ended tragically as the walls of his imagination collapsed and buried him. By the time he was twenty-six, he had published four novels, a collection of short stories, a book of travel sketches and four full-length plays. Michael Meyer recalled meeting him in 1948 at Uppsala University: "What one noticed about him first was his eyes, which were large – I had almost said staring, but that would give an entirely wrong impression; they were intensely reflective, mild and unseeing, like the eyes of a blind man. He spoke haltingly, in a low and scarcely audible voice, and my recollection is that his line of argument was rather muddled, but that out it emerged several sharply perceived truths." Born 25th October 1923, in a small farmhouse belonging to his grandparents, about a hundred miles from Stockholm, Stig was the illegitimate son of a quarryman named Helmer Jansson. His mother, a former telephone operator called Helga Andersson, believed she that would shortly marry Helmer and they would find a house of their own. But the couple quarreled and separated. The mother left the house of the grandparents, consigning her baby son to their care: "On New Year’s Day she went to the station with a small bag in one hand. She said nothing, but simply walked out of their lives. The snow whirled the old year away. She never came back." When Dagerman was twelve, his father married another woman, and he left his grandparent’s farm and went to live with his father and stepmother in Stockholm, entering a world of working-class people aspiring to throw off their peasant origins and become secretaries and white collar workers. The contrast, between the root-knowledge of the peasant farmer and the affectations and aspirations middle-class townspeople, affected him and entered much of his subsequent writing. Isolation and Inwardness At sixteen, he was stricken to hear that his grandfather had been murdered by a madman, causing his grandmother to die from shock a few weeks later. "The evening I heard about the murder," he recalled, "I went to the City Library and tried to write a poem to the dead man’s memory. Nothing came of it but a few pitiful lines which I tore up in shame. But out of that shame, out of that impotence and grief, something was born – something which I believe was the desire to become a writer; that is to say, to be able to tell of what it is to mourn, to have been loved; to be left lonely…" Years of isolation and inwardness followed. Stig was so lonely that he’d wander down to the railway station just to be among people. He even fantasised about taking a ticket to China, although he knew the idea was pointless. During these loiterings, he heard the ‘International’ sung at a meeting. He was strangely stirred and uplifted – a violent conversion ensued. He started to be drawn into the politics of syndicalism and became the editor of an anti-fascist newspaper. In such a context, at the age of twenty, he met and married Ann Marie Gotze, a German refugee whose mother and father had fought, and been imprisoned, during the Spanish Civil War. The heart of Europe beating Too poor to afford a house, the couple lived with Ann Marie’s parents in a one-room flat. Not only was this tiny area the living-quarter of the parents and Stig and Ann Marie, it was also a magnet for political and social outcasts. "He lived with refugees," wrote his biographer Olof Lagencranz, "and became himself a refugee. He learned, in the Gotzes kitchen, to look with distaste on the security and smugness which characterised Swedish everyday life. In this home he seemed to hear the heart of Europe beat, met other refugees, tramps of a new kind who had been driven on to the roads not, as in his grandparent’s time, by lack of work, but by lack of the right belief." Not long after his marriage, Dagerman made contact with a group of young writers; their outlook had been shaped by the darkness, holocaust and pessimism of the war years and the grim period of reappraisal that followed. There was a collapse of idealism; a loss of faith with the idea of trying to better humanity by social reform and a deepening interest in alienation, despair and anguish. Such ideas stimulated Dagerman to write and edit with such authority, flair and dark precision that he came to stand out "almost as an incarnation of the tortured period, a symbolic figure whose death seemed to confirm the conception of the poet as the martyr to his vision." Dagerman parted from his first wife, but his career continued to thrive. He released a flood of short stories, mainly of an autobiographical character, but always vital and showing a keen sense of locality and detail. Of his later novels, Burnt Child and Wedding Pains, Martin Seymour Smith (1973) wrote that they "are brilliant but so shot through with anguish that the final effect is of a half-muted shriek." But despite acclaim and a broadening circle of influence, changes were taking place inside him that oppressed and leached his energies. It was akin to a seeping paralysis of the spirit, a sinking of the desire to sustain the endless language-spinning that was his vocation and raison d’etre. Second Wife Despite encroaching despair and fragmentation, he found solace in Anita Björk, an attractive and talented young actress who became his second wife. They were "deeply and mutually in love" and whenever Mayer saw Dagerman during the summer of 1953, he seemed contented and serene. But in fact he was suffering from schizophrenia. There was a scattering – a dispersion of his usually focussed, highly active mind - and where formerly it had been possible, during the course of a single night, for him to complete sixty pages of text, now he was unable to fill half a page. He was subject to dark moods and was often visited by an overpowering urge to be alone. In the dead of night, he’d jump out of bed, take the car from the garage and drive for hours along the empty, monontonous roads, as though he longed to enter the darkness and be consumed by it. Time came when Dagerman felt that the dark was taking him over; the terrors of facing reality outweighed his fear of obliteration. On a morning in November 1954, he was found in his garage at the wheel of his car. The engine was not running, but the garage was full of gas, and Dagerman was dead. Earlier, in 1951, he had written to Anita: "It is a terrible experience, which I know you will be spared, to feel oneself disintegrate and sink, when one is praying to be allowed to grow and climb. Now that the choice has finally come between living like a pariah and dying wretchedly, I must choose as I have done, because I believe that a bad person’s death makes the world a better place. God grant our child may be like you. I have loved you, and will do so for as long as I am allowed to. Forgive me, but please believe me. Stig." This letter was never sent. It was found torn to pieces. Stig’s personality rallied. He lived on for three more years, battling with the illness, taking comfort when he could, but aware that part of his personality was being annexed by something foreign and baneful. Probably, too, part of him was succumbing. In madness, you cannot locate the dividing line. You do not know where the sane begins and the mad ends. If the sickness is progressive, the mad will drown the sane until no controlling centre will be left – no filter to restrain the furies. In such circumstances, some prefer to destroy the very cells from which such spectres may breed rather than manfully soldier on in half-world. Dagerman’s descent into suicide might strike the reader as essentially modern, the almost-sophisticated despair and fragmentation of someone born in the twentieth century with its attendant advantages and shocks. Given that he was one of the doomed generation who emerged, so to speak, our of the cave of the holcaust, he could hardly be expected to live a happy, contented life. His illness was no more than an internalisation of inherited tensions and guilts. Only God and a Stone are Sane It has been suggested that men like Dagerman go mad because they fill the raging voids of existence with yarns and visions rather than hide in a humble occupation like selling fire extinguishers or manufacturing false moustaches. The fact of being alive in a universe that does not supply answers but will one day re-process the human being like cosmic dust is alarming to those who desire order and security. If there is a guiding principle, most of us prefer it to be protective and compassionate - but what if the guiding principle is as chaotic and confused as the phenomena it generates? What if the Russian Revolution, say, or the Lisbon earthquake, is a precise reflection of the mind of God? Was it Voltaire who said: "I think the Earth is the lunatic asylum of all the planets."
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